Today I quit my six-figure job and tonight I’m sleeping in my van

After a little over 20 years in a government sector job, pursuing side hustles as a way to not go insane, I’m pulling the plug to help my brother with his startup and spend more time on my side hustles.

It’s hard to see the cost of a soul-sucking 9 to 5, but once you make up your mind that it is time to bail, all the things that you have been able to ignore come to the forefront all of a sudden — the arbitrary rules and deadlines, the disorientation of working to spend government money not earn revenue, and most of all, the necessary dronelike focus on passing time until retirement. That stuff is mostly fine, but it’s no longer for me. For better or worse, I’m out.

I have always been split between working an unfulfilling 9 to 5 and having rewarding side projects. It all started when I moved to Los Alamos after college while all of my friends moved to New York or Seattle or San Francisco. I thought oh man if I’m gonna live in a small town I’m gonna need some hobbies! That was the birth of the original boozhoundlabs.com in 2001, a handcoded raw HTML blog running on a server in the guest bedroom. It was super rad writing blog posts directly in HTML where you actually type out <p> tags around each paragraph.

Why “Boozhound Labs”? Well, the labs part is because I was living in a big science town, and wanted to reference that sort of highbrow conehead stuff while building crappy minibikes and working on old trucks. The Boozhound part is a little more complicated. When building stuff there was always a Miller Lite or a Sierra Nevada within reach. For a long time that worked great for me, but after 20 years of constant daily beer drinking, it started to maybe look like a problem. A few dark years of using booz to hide from real life, plus a DWI, and I decided to quit drinking. It has been a good choice, but I definitely still romanticize those days of cold beer, Doritos, and power tools. But the name remains. Maybe someday I will change it, but for now it is an awkward, catchy, misspelled reminder of where it all started.

So in the blog days of Boozhound Labs before I was selling kits, it was all about building shit and posting about it. I got a ton of great feedback from other folks building shit. It was super rewarding. Bikes, stereo stuff, car projects, etc. It was Maker Culture before it had that name.

At one point, the website was running on my Linux based wireless access point on a USB drive. It was a great setup, but one piece was missing — backups. USB drives are not super reliable, especially when being constantly read and written, and this one died with the website on it. At the time I wasn’t super motivated to recreate it from online archives so it stayed dead for a long time. Basically until now. This blog is a way to bring it back in a new form. I miss writing, and this is a great excuse to bang out blog posts.

So tonight I’m sleeping in my van. I had a great last day of work — wiped my phone, pulled my hard drive, and turned in my keys. Pretty much spent the rest of the day shooting the shit with coworkers and friends. I left that job to move to Denver to help my brother with his startup. He’s building a coworking space in LoDo. Stay tuned for that wesomeness. I’m definitely not retiring, and I’m definitely not financially independent. I need to pay bills for sure. But I just couldn’t see myself stayng where I was for the time it would take to achive retirement or financial independence. That job was the sort of job that could get me there in another 5–10 years, but I can’t stand the thought of achieving that goal but being 5–10 years older and having missed whatever those years hold on this path. Staring at a spreadsheet showing compounding savings projected into the future is a poor substitute for at least trying to do meaningful work.

The saying is something like “jump before you are ready” and to some extent that is what I’m doing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m debt free and have some money in the bank, but this is not one of those financial independence success stories I’m currently obsessed with. But compared to the staility of my old life this is retty nuts. I can’t wait.

So follow this blog if you are interested in one perspective on helping build a business, making side hustles real, and having some adventures.

Oh yeah the van. I’m flying out to see my brother and sister and thier mom for Thanksgiving, so I’m sleeping in the parking lot of Sandia Casino just North of Albuquerque. Not an exotic location, but it was the first best last minute option. Planning a place to stay when it is already dark is never ideal. The van is only barely habitable, but it’s ready for my first overnight trip. The heat is working, the lights work, the fridge works, and there is a bed. Home sweet home.

I definitely need to get some privacy curtains. This parking lot is very well lit. And there is no wifi so I’m writing this in a text editor not diectly on Medium. The good news is that it isn’t too cold, my down sleeping bag is super comfy, and i’m backed up to a golf course. I even found a brand new Pro V1 while taking a leak.